Chooch.AI,  an artificial intelligence training platform for visual recognition, has raised a $2.8 million seed round led by venture capital firm Vickers Venture Partners. The round also includes funding from angel investors. The funds will be used to expand market reach and grow the team, including hiring additional engineers.

“Chooch’s novel technology, with its focus on AI training and flexible integrations, means that it is uniquely positioned to be an end-to-end, deep learning visual AI solution, and an alternative visual solution to Google Vision or Amazon Rekognition. We look forward to working closely with the Chooch team as they expand across regions,”  commented Vickers Venture Partners Chairman Dr. Finian Tan.

Chooch has been easily deployed by customers for a wide range of applications on many platforms. Chooch is rapidly trained to be a visual expert in any field, from aircraft engine parts, to types of human faces, to counting cancer cells. When Chooch is presented with images or videos that contain perceptions learned by its neural networks, Chooch returns metadata such as a person’s identity or model of a helicopter. Chooch can be trained to accurately identify features in any media, such as web-based video or images on mobile phones, live drone feeds and medical imagery.

“We’ve made machine learning for computer vision super easy to use and implement at scale,” explains Emrah Gultekin, CEO of Chooch AI. “This provides massive competitive advantages to companies who need to implement Visual AI into their processes.”

The ROI is immediate because of the increased speed of tagging images for media, e-commerce and security companies, e.g., Chooch can do facial recognition training in real time, increase revenue by 5x for video advertising and reduce costs by 80x for tagging of visual data like photojournalism.

“That’s a game changer for our business,” says Jonathan Wells, CEO of the photo agency SIPA USA. “We can be processing 1000’s of photos per day and dozens of shoots from LA to Milan.” The photo agency SIPA USA uses Chooch to tag photos in real time from the Oscars red carpet, sporting events and fashion runways worldwide, an illustrative case study of the value of Chooch.